The most interesting things to read this January weekend

Dear Friends,

Late last week, I made a quick stop in Milan. I ended up in a charming artisanal pasta shop full of dark purple pappardelle. This, in turn, led me to a delightful essay in The Atlantic’s archive about the history of that food. It was written by Corby Kummer in 1986, a year in which I consumed more than my fair share of a pasta concoction that Kummer explains is not Italian at all. “For whatever reasons, what became Italian-American cuisine started with a base of Campanian food, minus many kinds of vegetables and cheeses plus a lot of meat. Thus the rise of spaghetti and meatballs, a dish unknown in Italy.” Kummer’s piece is a remarkable combination of history-via-gastronomy and culinary advice. You will learn about the geography of Italy, why a prominent fascist author in the ‘30s tried to ban the dish, and how not to make your vermicelli slimy. I recommend reading it before you trash your own kitchen, as I did recently as a sous-chef to my nine-year-old, trying to make homemade noodles.

I was also captivated by this story about a juror in Texas who, many years after sending someone to prison, decided to undo what she knew had been a mistake. I have read many stories about justice gone wrong, but never one where a jury member comes to the rescue 27 years after being intimidated into convicting an innocent man. “Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way. Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.”

I read a lot, but apparently not nearly as much as Steven Soderbergh. I do, though, want to recommend two extraordinary books I finished last week, both of which, in ways, are about fathers and sons. The first is Tim Alberta’s outstanding The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. It’s a story about the evangelical church in this country, and how so many leaders became convinced that Trumpism and Christianity are the same thing. Alberta is the son of an evangelical minister and a strong believer of the kind of Christianity described in the Gospels, where you come to church to worship at the cross and not at an American flag. It’s a story too about the people trying to save the evangelical church from this lurch. The second book is Cullen Murphy’s Cartoon County, a beautiful memoir about growing up, and then working, with his father, Jack Murphy, who for many years drew Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt. The book is remarkable both for the incredibly textured memories of a parent but also the viewport into a world of artists from the vanishing world of newspaper comics.

I was pulled into this terrific Joshua Green dispatch from Beaver County, Pennsylvania about populism in America. As Green points out, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders dominated the vote in 2016 in the counties that lost the most jobs to Chinese competition. Now think about what’s going to happen with all the job churn likely to come from AI. Meanwhile, I greatly enjoyed Anna Wiener’s essay about memoirs of office life and this essay from National Review by Sebastian Junger about why journalism matters. (I also recommend this excerpt about a near-death experience that Junger describes on the Joe Rogan show.) Plus Kurt Gödel’s explanation to his mother about why there must be an afterlife, and this essay, by Emily Sohn, about the pioneering journalist and adventurer Virginia Kraft. Also: my god, read Kate Knibbs on what happened to The Hairpin. Meanwhile, this is a superb Sweat Science essay about why nutritional supplements mostly don’t work—though, if you’re a runner, you might want to be taking caffeine, nitrates, baking soda, and, maybe, just maybe, creatine. 

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Christian Marclay’s magnificent 2010 video installation The Clock (which novelist Zadie Smith called “maybe the greatest film [I] have ever seen”) took three years to hand-assemble. Marclay and his assistants pored over thousands and thousands of films to find a clock face displaying every one of the 1,440 minutes in a day. They then edited these clips together so that those clocks themselves keep real time.

These days, Marclay’s searching would have been a lot easier, thanks to AI. (But is the beauty of the original partly due to the painstaking work the viewer knows was put in?) In any case, AI has now created the possibility of turning video, text, and audio into mathematical formulations called “vectors,” which enables what’s called “vector search.” The idea, which underpins so much of the AI we use right now, is that everything from images to emotions can be represented by numbers arranged multi-dimensionally. Imagine the digits that represent the word “blueberry” somewhere off in a large language model. Those numbers indicate that the word has a closer association with “Maine” than with “Texas,” that there’s a story involving them that includes a girl named “Sal,” that they are shaped more like balloons than like cinder blocks, and that Robert Downey Jr. gives them to Chris Evans at one point in Avengers.

With that, vector search is a new AI technology that can roam over vast data sets looking for holistic relationships between images, audio, and text. Running a script that searches for the word “clock” in all editions of this newsletter is easy; finding all the images of clocks in episodes of Seinfeld is hard. Here’s a post explaining how the tech works at Netflix, a company that has made enormous investments in refining its own search algorithm—including starting a contest that led to one of the most fun features I edited during my first run at WIRED. I also love that it can enable search across data sets that include multiple languages. The vector associated with “blueberry” should be the same as the one associated with “arándano.”

It’s a fascinating tool. And, as you ponder it, here’s a terrific essay from Stephen Marche in The Atlantic about AI art, and some creations from  from David Salle, Laurie Anderson, and Takashi Murakami.

cheers * N

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